English-speaking children (N = 122) in French immersion classes participated in a 1-year longitudinal study of the relation between phonological awareness and reading achievement in both languages. Participants were administered measures of word decoding and of phonological awareness in French and in English as well as measures of cognitive ability, speeded naming, and pseudoword repetition in English only. The relation of phonological awareness in French to reading achievement in each of the languages were equivalent to that in English. These relations remained significant after partialing out the influences of speeded naming and pseudoword repetition. Phonological awareness in both languages was specifically associated with 1-year increments in decoding skill in French. These findings support the transfer of phonological awareness skills across alphabetic languages.Children in immersion programs learn to read in a language different from the one spoken at home. Little is known about the cognitive mechanisms involved in this learning. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relations between phonological processing skills and word decoding ability (reading isolated words) in children in French immersion. More precisely, we explored the possibil-

A componential model capable of representing simple and complex forms of mental addition was proposed and then tested by using chronometric techniques. A sample of 23 undergraduate students responded to 800 addition problems in a true-false reaction time paradigm. The 800 problems comprised 200 problems of each of four types: two single-digit addends, one singleand one double-digit addend, two double-digit addends, and three single-digit addends. The results revealed that the columnwise product of addends, a structural variable consistent with a memory network retrieval process, was the best predictor of mental addition for each of the four types of problem. Importantly, the componential model allowed estimation of effects of several other structural variables, e.g., carrying to the next column and speed of encoding of digits. High levels of explained variance verified the power of the model to represent the reaction time data, and the stability of estimates across types of problem implied consistent component use by subjects. Implications for research on mental addition are discussed.Over the past 20 years, several types of models for mental addition have been proposed--for example, models hypothesizing that analog (Restle, 1970), counting (Groen & Parkman, 1972), or memory network retrieval (Ashcrafl & Battaglia, 1978) processes are invoked to arrive at the solution for a given problem. Although a great deal has been learned about the manner in which persons respond to addition problems, a comprehensive model identifying the several elementary processes underlying problem solution has not been developed. The primary aim of the present study is to propose and, by use of chronometric techniques, to evaluate a general processing model specifying the processes required to solve mental addition problems of any magnitude. Sternberg (1977) outlined the componential analysis approach for isolating the elementary information processes involved in solving ability problems. Chronometric, or reaction time (RT), tasks are typically used to validate proposed componential models. In the componential analysis framework, internal validation refers to the determination that RT to problems of a given domain is affected by the hypothesized elementary information processes. Internal validation may take two forms: intensive and extensive. Intensive validation

Simple addition problems were presented using a true/false reaction time (RT) verification paradigm to 77 academically normal and 46 learning disabled (LD) subjects in the second, fourth, or sixth grade. The experiment was designed to determine the potential process deficits associated with a learning disability in mathematics achievement. Structural models representing alternative process strategies were fit to RT data. Across grade level and academic status, RT was best fitted by structural variables representing either an implicit counting strategy or a memory retrieval process. The majority of normal and LD second-grade subjects used the implicit counting strategy for problem solution; however, LD subjects required a greater amount of time to execute this process and appeared to be deficient in the ability to self-monitor the problem-solving process. A clear shift from reliance on the implicit counting strategy to the memory-retrieval process was evident from the second to sixth grade for normal subjects. No such shift was evident for LD subjects, as the majority of these subjects relied on the counting strategy in the second, fourth, and sixth grade. Subjects having a specific learning disability in mathematics achievement appear to differ from academically normal

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English language predictors of English and French reading development were investigated in a group of 140 children who were enrolled in French immersion programs. Children were first tested in kindergarten, and their reading achievement was tested yearly in both English and French from Grades 1 to 3, with word-level and passage-level measures that assessed accuracy as well as fluency. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to examine which English variables predicted Grade 3 outcomes and growth rates in English and French, and to determine the set of predictors that accounted for the most variance in outcomes and growth rates in English and French reading. The variables that predicted English reading development were consistent with studies of monolingual English children, even though participants were concurrently learning to read in French. Our findings provide evidence that at least some of the skills that play a role in learning to read are general cognitive and linguistic skills that transfer across languages. Phonological awareness, letter-sound knowledge, rapid automatized naming, and grammatical ability in English were able to predict reading ability in French. In contrast, English receptive vocabulary was a language-specific predictor. These findings demonstrate that first-language measures can be useful in the early identification of children at risk for difficulty in learning to read in a second language.